Joey Letz goes on a mission to help three people find money, energy and a career.  Is he up for the challenge and will he prevail?  Read his answers and find out! 
Submit your own questions for Joey at info@LenaLamoray.com
He may be back for you next time!

1--How can I get rich?

Well, I don’t know where you're from but where I come from children are put into educational institutions before they are old enough to think for themselves where they spend most of their lives away from their families and try to earn good grades.

Now, I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve heard that if you get good grades in high school then you can go to a good college and THEN you can become a doctor.

I’ve heard that doctors in America can make millions of dollars since health care providers are so quick to deny someone of benefits just to save a buck.  America has one of the worst health care systems in the world. The same health care that most people feel they need to be a slave of for the better part of their adult lives. I believe that most of this country is pretty rich and since the health care sucks people are forced to pay millions for operations that are free in most other countries, INCLUDING CUBA! So that’s how I think you get rich. Become an American doctor.

Now if you wanna have "FUN".... go cow tipping.

2--Joeyyyy how do you do to have all that energy on stage always :O? love from argentina

The energy I have on stage is a combination of a few things. First off, let me start off by saying that anyone that knows me knows that I’m not a very serious person except for the one hour before I go onstage. I’m usually the guy that’s putting stink bombs in people’s bunks on the bus or saran wrap on the toilet, but my techs and band mates all know that the hour before I go on I am not to be targeted for any kind of revenge, no matter how deserving I may be. I’ve come within inches of several fistfights over this actually.

Now life on the road can be exhausting, especially with all the partying. Many nights I end up blacking out, which I’ve come to notice that they don’t really count as sleep. First off, you’re lucky if you wake up without any pictures of penises on your face or freshly shaven eyebrows but that’s about all your lucky about. I’m convinced that I usually sit in my bunk and have conversations with people who aren’t really there for 10 hours. I then get out of my bunk without having really fallen asleep yet and without remembering anything at all. Usually you feel good in the morning, but that’s just because you drank so much the night before that you’re still drunk and will be until about 7 or 8 at night, at which time it’s almost about time to get ready to play. At this point, I usually start getting the shakes and my body may start to convulse and I get what I think is restless leg syndrome, like seen in those commercials. While my band mates might medicate themselves by beginning to drink immediately, I have a "no drink before the show rule", being that I have to play to a click track onstage and my mistakes are more noticeable than any others in my band.

So anyway, exactly an hour before my show I begin my ritual. I begin my pre show set list on my ipod boom box, which consists of the first half of the record BLAST TYRANT by CLUTCH, this record gets me feeling a certain groove which I feel is important ESPECIALLY for industrial music that is played to a click. Next is the first half of APOCOLYPSE DUDES by TURBONEGRO. for those who don’t know, TURBONEGRO is a band from Norway that plays rock and roll and acts like they're gay when they really aren’t. I relate to this record on many levels and so this record totally gets me in the party. I wanna have fun and act gay but not be gay mode (which I’m usually on 24 hours a day anyway). During these parts of the play list I do some stretches that people say are like yoga moves, although I have never done real yoga so I wouldn’t know. I pretty much zone out when I’m doing this, and that’s why I freak out if someone tries to fuck with me because it totally fucks up my head space and could even make me have a shitty show. I’m pretty sure that by stretching the way I do I’m breaking up some toxins from the night before and making my body kind of high, in a way. I then loosen up with a pair of sticks, while doing all of this, I sip usually about 2-3 red bulls. Oh, I also take 4 Advil every night so that I don’t feel my brain shaking around in my skull (which is actually probably a bad thing), and a Zantac so I don’t get heartburn from the red bulls. AND THEN, right before I go onstage I listen to PEOPLE = SHIT by SLIPKNOT. This song is brutal and it makes me want to kill people………………….and that is my recipe for onstage energy.

I’d like to mention in a side note that I’ve since given up drinking and my upcoming tour with Mindless Self Indulgence will be my first sober one. I’m actually really excited to see how much more energy I pull out onstage now that I’m not drinking a liter of whiskey and smoking a pack of cigarettes and I am actually getting a good nights rest every night. So ask me this again in a few months. I might tell you that I draw birds for an hour before I go onstage to get energy.

3--Hey Joey, What advice would you give a kid who wants to play but thinks financial security is more important than playing music?

First of all I will try to put things in perspective for you, the way I saw it when I was deciding to live this lifestyle was simple. I figured, one day I’m gonna be dead so will my kids and their kids, so what good would any amount of money be at that point. I figured that when I was old I wouldn’t want to look back on having worked some job where I was making even a million dollars a year, only to think about what I wished I would have done instead, and with no way to really enjoy the money.

I’ve had jobs where I was making decent money and working my ass off and followed them up with being jobless and eating nothing but 25 cent granola bars all day and selling crap to pay rent. These times were always when I was the happiest. When I had no one to answer to and when I had nothing else to do but focus on my talent. This, to me, was more valuable than any dollar amount or health benefit plan I could get from any employer.

It’s this same attitude that made me wanna join my favorite band, AMEN, knowing that I would never make a dollar. I saw the experience as priceless and it has served as a great stepping stone for me and I have not been jobless since.

Too many times friends call me up and ask me to try and get them gigs and the few times I sought out what I thought to be good opportunities, people didn't entertain the idea because they wouldn’t be making X amount of dollars.

To be honest, I believe this is why there are "so many musicians out there, but only a few who really made it", because everyone is always worried about crap like this. Now that I’m doing what I’m doing, while I in no way feel like I’ve "made it" yet, I’m still doing much more than many people I grew up with who have strived to do the same thing and still do. Frankly, the reason I believe that I am doing this and so many others are not is because of this attitude towards money and stability.

I really feel that you have to be willing to lose anything and everything to really be able to do something that you love, and only then will you see true success at it. Because when you have nothing to lose, you can only gain.

Now while we both know that there are a million kids who would give their right nut to do what I do, to travel around the world and play for thousands of people a night and get paid for it, if you told them, HEY, YOU CAN DO THAT TOO, ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS EAT 25 CENT GRANOLA BARS FOR 2 YEARS AND SLEEP ON COUCHES, AND SOME TIMES YOU WILL BE SO STRESSED OUT THAT YOU WILL MAKE YOURSELF SICK AND THE WHOLE TIME YOUR FAMILY WILL PRACTICALLY DISOWN YOU BECAUSE THEY WILL THINK YOU ARE A FAILURE, BUT THEN ON THIS DATE OF THIS YEAR, YOU'LL BE SET... Do you think most people are really capable of that? Not at all! If you can set yourself aside from the norm and figure out how to have this attitude, then I believe that you will find success in playing music. The road to this goal is filled with scary obstacles and a great lack of support from loved ones, so it certainly takes a special person to stick to it.

I’m actually reading the Slash autobiography right now. Read it! They've just toured around the world for 2 years after putting out Appetite for Destruction and he comes back to LA and gets a studio apartment for like a few hundred bucks a month and it gets trashed and he sleeps on glass every night, meanwhile having 2 records in the top of the billboard charts. That was Guns and Roses and at a time when record labels were dumping millions into bands and records, and it took him that long to be able to buy a guitar from Gibson at cost! These dudes had it, what it takes, I highly recommend that book.